tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4060278444146897035.post5383831931200305172..comments2018-05-07T19:26:57.976-07:00Comments on UNITING WARMTH &amp; LIGHT: On Sailing Sinking Ships, pt. III of IIIChristopher Corbinnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4060278444146897035.post-87529357417218819152018-04-06T06:25:04.263-07:002018-04-06T06:25:04.263-07:00Sorry to take a little longer to respond on this o...Sorry to take a little longer to respond on this one. Let me preface this by saying that I fully agree with the idea that ASA has become useless as a measure of where we actually are. I would also say that you&#39;re right on to that that it &quot;grossly **under**measures real existing involvement, while probably also grossly **over**measuring formational/missional effectiveness in people&#39;s lives,&quot; or at least in many cases it does. My experience has been that there exist communities that I would say are far from the model of health where primary involvement is still Sunday morning worship: no outreach to speak of on a regular basis, no Christian ed, maybe fellowship as an extension of worship time and space. Recognizing the existence of these places is certainly no apology for ASA; to the contrary, I think these represent places where both existing involvement (if &quot;involvement&quot; means more than keeping a seat warm) is at best accurately reported and possibly over-measured AND &quot;formation/missional effectiveness&quot; is still unquestionably over-measured.<br />I think we probably agree on about 98% of this concept. So my question here really is not meant to be a significant rejection of your proposal but just gaining clarity on my end and putting forward some potential concerns (but again not disqualifying ones). I&#39;m not inherently opposed to the notion of including the in-house institutional measure considered as distinguishable from the discipleship metrics. I would just want to make sure that however this is considered, it is understood as a kind of intentional transitional measure that will give us a cushion institutionally to adjust to a largely discipleship-based measure of health. I would want a measure that incentivize attempts to move toward better discipleship practices and dis-incentivize practice that put up quantitative growth without a holistic view of discipleship. I say this piece about &quot;holistic discipleship&quot; only because I know that some would push-back and say that people&#39;s involvement in outreach ministries is discipleship. This is true—if it&#39;s a PART of a discipleship program. Anyway, I think there are certainly ways that this metric could both address the current need for institutional measures that you rightly point out while also facilitating a movement toward primarily discipleship oriented metrics. I&#39;m interested to hear your thoughts here.Christopher Corbinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05742868173176694318noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4060278444146897035.post-43218781901066264672018-04-03T22:23:52.610-07:002018-04-03T22:23:52.610-07:00I think the most striking assessment from the 3 pa...I think the most striking assessment from the 3 part blog is the apparent correlation between expectation of a particular standard of participation and involvement in the life of the faith community and growth and retention of people in that community. I have believed this for a long time; the church is failing at having and clearly defining what is expected of people who wish to be part of the faith community and it is bad about challenging and holding people (particularly leaders in the church) accountable to those expectations.Debbie Corbinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17817470627397662034noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4060278444146897035.post-53644280682439606982018-04-03T15:00:17.232-07:002018-04-03T15:00:17.232-07:00Yes, it&#39;s tricky. (I wrote a piece for Covenan...Yes, it&#39;s tricky. (I wrote a piece for Covenant awhile back hoping to open a dialogue on similar stuff [not my title!] -- https://livingchurch.org/covenant/2017/03/07/welcoming-involving-newcomers-church-contact-expectations/<br /><br />Thanks for this conversation! I think just from my experience in a parish in a university town that is seeing a lot of people under 35 engage in various ways that don&#39;t always center on Sunday, and in another sense from my experience dealing with the institutional church over a couple decades, I&#39;d want to argue for an AREA a bit wider than yours. I actually agree strongly with what you say about worship and formation as key to who we are, and think the 4 things you talk about measuring (AREA, adult baptisms, giving%, and missional impact) are a terrific way to measure how we&#39;re really doing at growing disciples. <br /><br />That is an important thing to measure, and we&#39;re just going to have to learn to do it and measure it in TEC. Still, I think there are also reasons to have a benchmark available that reflects the fact that a culture of discipleship is still extremely new in most mainline settings, and gives us a way to measure our actuality (without losing the vision of growing into a church that takes more seriously the fact that we are confronted by a post-Christian culture).<br /><br />So this is the institutional in-house piece: ASA was based on the assumption that the baseline beginning way most people expressed commitment to a church was to be there on Sunday morning, and only a smaller nucleus of more committed folks engaged weekdays -- so if we counted anything but Sunday morning, we&#39;d be &quot;double counting&quot; people. This is just dead wrong now - both because some people&#39;s weekly service is Wed night or Tue morning, and others are away most weekends but *regularly* serve in a weekly outreach ministry. ASA has become useless not just as a measure of &quot;how are we doing spiritually&quot; (which it was never that great at) but also for its prior in-house function, answering questions like &quot;What kind of church is this? How many clergy does it need and what should it be able to pay them? What should its ministry model be?&quot; Not a true faith-commitment benchmark, though we fooled ourselves that it was. I think at least for the next 20-25 years, we will still need this kind of in-house benchmark institutionally, and for AREA to be that, it would need to include all Regular Events, not just disciplemaking ones. <br /><br />Just completely shooting from the hip, if AREA were to be involvement in church-sponsored outreach, worship, study, or fellowship (minimum monthly, but on any day of the week), I think my 126-ASA church would be maybe 180 monthly AREA. So in our current &quot;society no longer sends us Sunday-Christians automatically, but we haven&#39;t learned to be disciplemakers yet either&quot; situation, ASA grossly **under**measures real existing involvement, while probably also grossly **over**measuring formational/missional effectiveness in people&#39;s lives. Beth Maynardhttps://twitter.com/beth_maynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4060278444146897035.post-7773564427074652042018-04-03T13:26:15.337-07:002018-04-03T13:26:15.337-07:00Beth, thanks for bringing this up: I&#39;ll prefac...Beth, thanks for bringing this up: I&#39;ll preface for everyone else reading out there that AREA (Average Regular Event Attendance) was my own creation and as far as I know is out in the world only on this blog and for people engaging with it. I agree that ASA is no longer the most helpful metric for measuring the actual engagement of a congregation based on changing forms of congregational engagement in society at large. At the same time, I&#39;m wary of trends toward replacing ASA with something like &quot;missional impact.&quot; Rather than focusing on the actual changes in churchgoing for active churchgoers, shifting to a more episodic measure in lieu of a measure of regular attendance seems to be a way to keep numbers high rather than take a hard look at how effectively congregations are developing disciples. That&#39;s a long way of saying: we must recognize that people don&#39;t necessarily come to Sunday worship as frequently, but we need a metric that helps us take a hard look at whether that shift is because people are engaging in different ways, but still active in church, or if people just aren&#39;t involved in congregational life as much.<br />So how would AREA actually work in practice? A congregation would need to identify what &quot;regularly&quot; offered events it has. Standards would need to be developed for what constitute acceptable and unacceptable offerings. Ideally you would want &quot;regular&quot; events to still center significantly on worship, Christian education/fellowship and be events that happen at least monthly. I&#39;m still enough of a Wesleyan (and this isn&#39;t in any way exclusively Wesleyan) to believe that forming disciples means regular self- and corporate spiritual discipline and participation. At the same time, AREA would allow for difference in how that regular participation plays out (do you have huge numbers of people coming for regular bible study, house groups, weekday prayer/healing/Taize services, etc.) depending on the local context. <br />Some people I&#39;m sure will be disappointed that I don&#39;t think &quot;missional impact&quot; type metrics should replace regular attendance ones. I am not, however, advocating that congregations should not be involved in missional outreach or social justice work. To the contrary, I think that congregation that does not engage in such work is failing in its discipleship. And, if the primary purpose of the Church were to offer social services, then this would be a fine metric. However, the primary purpose of the Church is to invite people into relationship with Jesus Christ and then help them become better disciple. Works of mercy and social justice are no doubt part of that discipleship, but they are not the whole of it. <br />The solution, I believe is to move beyond an either/or approach to measures of vitality to a more holistic, multi-faceted, integrated one. This is especially true if the point of evaluation, as it always should be, is to help point out and where a community is doing well in its mission and where it may need to shore up some weaknesses. So I would say that you need at least four equally weighted independent measures: adult baptisms and professions of faith (how many new people are invited into the Christian life), AREA (how well are you doing at retention and time investment), median giving as a percentage of income (how much are people invested with their material resources), and missional impact (how much are people committed to living out their faith in the world on behalf of the Church). <br />This is still a thought in progress, though, so let&#39;s keep workshoping it. I want measures that don&#39;t get us off the hook for failing in our outreach and evangelistic endeavors, but I also don&#39;t want measures that fail to notice the shifting social patterns of how people regularly engage with institutions. Christopher Corbinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05742868173176694318noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4060278444146897035.post-21030691736142598942018-04-03T06:47:14.773-07:002018-04-03T06:47:14.773-07:00So, as I tweeted you, I&#39;d love to have a conve...So, as I tweeted you, I&#39;d love to have a conversation about AREA as a metric. It&#39;s obvious to me that while ASA was useful a decade plus ago when &quot;regular&quot; Sunday attendance (say 3/4) was actually fairly common among people who considered themselves active members, using ASA now grossly misrepresents the population involved in a parish when &quot;active&quot; often means 2/4 or even 1/4 Sunday mornings. And yet so many of our mainline tools depend on it (the Parochial Report, and the family-pastoral-program paradigm -- tho don&#39;t get me started on the &quot;programs&quot; assumption there, either.) I&#39;ve seen suggestions that we should simply report other things (e.g. adult baptisms). But I think some metric that measures &quot;engagement&quot; would be better. Have you thought through how you&#39;d measure AREA?Beth Maynardhttps://twitter.com/beth_maynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4060278444146897035.post-45076561541701754962018-04-02T18:12:43.538-07:002018-04-02T18:12:43.538-07:00Chris, I appreciate this very well thought out and...Chris, I appreciate this very well thought out and written third part. I believe that when a church has a healthy discipleship process then the measurable benchmarks of church vitality like average worship attendance, participation, giving, etc. can&#39;t help but increase as a natural outgrowth of vital relationships with God and growth as disciples. By the way, I like your kinda creepy Jesus with the Easter Bunny.Ivan G. Corbinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09949216183794954758noreply@blogger.com